CONTRABANNED 

The first women’s health textbook designed to be smuggled into women’s prisons

Women's prisons are banning women's health books because the images inside are deemed "pornographic." (You know, anatomical diagrams. Medical illustrations. The stuff in any high school biology textbook.) And men's prisons? Not dealing with this. Shocker. This means women are at way higher risk of dying from completely preventable, treatable conditions. Since the system wouldn’t let life-saving information through the front door, we had to find another way with Contrabanned.

Watch the case film

While text books may be banned, “letters” aren’t. So we mailed Contrabanned in page by page. (Because you can't ban mail the same way you ban books, and loopholes? Who doesn’t love a loophole?)

The assembly process couldn’t just work for us. It had to work for the women actually receiving it, with whatever supplies they could access in prison. Which is…not a lot. We sent in the “letters” with pre-punched holes, and then our contact on the inside saddle-stitched the pages together with dental floss. (Which, by the way, is only sold in 6-inch lengths at commissaries.)